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After a long tenure as deputy director of the NIH Information Technology Center, Stacy Album is preparing to head to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. At the new ACT-IAC Technology Conference in Cambridge, Maryland, earlier this week, Federal Drive with Tom Temin caught up with the Album to discuss what her new job would be.
Interview transcript:
Stacey Album: I will join the CIO as Deputy Director of Enterprise Strategy.
Tom Tem: What does this mean, company strategy? Enterprise IT strategy? Or what should the FDIC do for a living?
Stacey Album: So FDIC has a pretty impressive IT operation out there. And I’m going there, one of the big things I’m going to do is guide the development of the next strategic plan for IT. And working with a team of IT leaders led by Sylvia Burns, of course, on modernizing IT infrastructure and architecture. And what makes me most happy, the role I will have in this new position is engaging and partnering with programs across the agency. So that they learn about their business, and more about the mission, and that they make sure that IT responds to their needs and meets them. And obviously, I was very happy to have supported so many amazing missions across the federal government in the last two decades. This is my fifth agency, and I will not spend the last 15 years supporting scientific missions. So, protecting people’s health, let’s go more into the financial industry. But personally, maintaining the stability of public confidence in the country’s financial system is a pretty important job. And I’m really honored to have joined the FDIC family and been a part of it.
Tom Tem: You mentioned consolidating missions there over the network. And you did that in NIH, to some extent, all the different components of NIH, I think there are a few dozen different components within NIH, different institutes, and there was a construction, a deliberate way to connect them to one network. Maybe review it for us, where does it all stand now? Is it done? Or is it still evolving?
Stacey Album: The network is one of the most critical set of opportunities we provide at NIH’s IT center. As you have heard, we are so dependent on it with the huge amounts of data we generate. And so, when I joined NIH in 2017, we were in the middle of modernizing our network. And so we ended it around, say, 2018, 2019, and stabilized. Believe it or not, we are now moving on to the next generation of our networking capabilities. And so one of the things I love about NIH is that it’s really a community. So, although the way it is organized and functions is very connected, we really get together as a community. So we are currently working with other institutes and centers and with industry to formulate our vision for the future of the network.
Tom Tem: And what did you learn from that effort that could take you to the FDIC?
Stacey Album: Well, something that is quite relevant and will play in my role, and that is the importance of understanding business, connecting technology with business, spending time establishing those partnerships with people across the agency, and really working with them and jointly creating solutions from them. Embedding IT in business. And so I learned a lot about it at NIH. And I’m excited to do the same at FDIC.
Tom Tem: And the purpose of the network is, of course, to move data.
Stacey Album: Six petabytes in our agency.
Tom Tem: Right. And that is something that could not have been imagined 20 or 40 years ago, when this whole IT thing started in the government. So what do your data learning people need to know about data at this age, when you move six petabytes a day?
Stacey Album: Well, it’s interesting, because we’ve always worked a lot in labs, and what our network has really done is connect all those facilities together and give us the ability to share data and store and manage it in ways we never could before. And the network is certainly at the core of that. But what we’ve been doing recently through our Advancement Program is moving large amounts of research data to our cloud platforms. And I don’t know that we could have imagined that even five years ago. And that’s why I think the greatest learning when it comes to data is just that the landscape always changes the data that will always be at the heart of what we do and all our programs, but the world around us is changing and we have to be, you know, on some a way to watch where the world is going and move with it and not be afraid to make the next jump.
Tom Tem: And you were in a way a pioneer or at least a pioneer of the idea of what you call missionary excursions. Tell us what they were in NIH and do you plan to do something in FDIC?
Stacey Album: Yes. And I guess Sylvia probably already got an advantage in that at the FDIC. So I’m excited to go there. She has been running an IT organization for several years. But when I came to NIH, you know, we have an amazing mission, and a really talented, dedicated workforce, I call those things together, a kind of secret sauce of every amazing work experience. But what I have noticed is that some of ours have a very diverse IT workforce. And some of our newer employees have not had the opportunity to really engage with the wider NIH community and learn about the broader mission. At the same time, we had a lot of talented individuals who worked at NIH for years, even decades, and maybe at some point they became, you know, excluded or more distant from it. So if it was part of our program, most people would call it employee engagement, I call it improving the employee experience. Because our employees are engaged. And it is our responsibility as leaders to improve our experience. So we started a big, cornerstone of this program were mission excursions, where we organized groups of staff to go to laboratories, to programs, instead of them having to come to us and understand the difference from day to day outside in NIH.
Tom Tem: And you have some really good examples that have instilled that idea in their brains, such as the fact that the lack of good Wi-Fi coverage, yes, can affect the outcome of a clinical trial.
Stacey Album: True, or even cellular. Before we modernized the network, which included our wireless and mobile coverage, we lacked those capabilities. And one of the most special places in NIH is our clinical center where, you know, people come where they have nowhere to go. It’s like our former director, Dr. Colin says, you know, he thinks of us as a national institute of hope, an institute of hope. And that was one place where I collaborated with some of my colleagues at the clinical center. And they were kind enough to take us on tours where we could see first hand the patient care that takes place in the clinics we run.
Tom Tem: That’s right, there were people who did detours because they didn’t have Wi-Fi. And that led to the idea that even something as ordinary as Wi-Fi coverage is important.
Stacey Album: Just so. It is very important.
Tom Supply: IIn some cases, these basics are more important than the next artificial intelligence project.
Stacey Album: And when you as a technologist see it first hand, whether you are an engineer, or an operator or a programmer, and you stop and think for a moment, it could be a member of my family who cares there. It could be my child, my brother, my sister, my neighbor, my friend, you know, he came here for help and hope, and wouldn’t you like them to have all the opportunities that NIH offers?
Tom Tem: And finally, what is the next limit for the user experience in relation to a federal employee?
Stacey Album: Yes. So the user experience is, of course, in vogue right now, which I think you know well, Tom. And one of the philosophies I believe in is that the user experience really starts with the employee experience. And you have to give your people, those who do the work every day in your organizations, a positive experience that will, you know, really penetrate other agencies, the clients you serve, both internally and externally. And that’s why we put a lot of focus in our organization, we have a set of operational principles for empowering people. enable innovation and deliver value. A set of basic values that we live and breathe every day. And the basis is diversity, equality and inclusion, which I believe encourage innovation and create excellence in any organization. And that was one of the things that really attracted me to FDIC when I was getting ready to take this opportunity, I read the FDIC strategic plan, the CIO organization’s IT strategic plan, and their core values resonated with me a lot.
Tom Tem: Stacy Album is the new Deputy Director of Enterprise Strategy at the CIO office of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.